Book Promotion Strategy - Book Industry Reviews : Part One
What Are Pre-Pub Book Industry Reviews? How To Get Them & Are They Worth It?
Book Industry Reviews - Part One
My upcoming book, Get Your Book Seen and Sold: a complete book marketing and publishing guide (written with co-author, Julie Murkette, launches as a trade paperback and as an ebook on September 22, 2023. We can’t wait to get the book in the hands of authors!
The pub date is essentially FIVE months away.
In this edition of Countdown to Book Launch Diary I cover our Pre-Publication Book Industry Review Outreach.
If you search for any book on Amazon you will notice many quoted endorsements on the book’s page. For example, here are the endorsements on the Amazon book page for More Than You’ll Ever Know by Katie Gutierrez (a book I just reviewed for ArtsNewsNow.com)
You can see on the image above that there are review quotes from:
Library Journal, Bookpage, Kirkus, BookList
These are all examples of Book Industry Reviewers
This past week Julie, my co-author, and I reviewed our detailed book marketing plan for Get Your Book Seen and Sold. We decided to press the button on a pre-publication outreach to book industry reviewers.
A book marketing plan is simply all the tasks you have decided to do to promote your book.
Note: Julie and I developed a book marketing plan in Jan 2023 - nine months in advance of publication. For reference, our manuscript was completed in August 2022 and Julie has been editing and formatting the book since. As I often write in my posts on Substack, I have been thinking about and keeping notes on book marketing before during and after the writing of the manuscript. If you are keeping track, the manuscript was finished eleven months ago and we decided to wait to publish until September 2023 to take advantage of some book marketing strategies.
Book Industry Reviews - Strategy #1
What is a Book Industry Review?
Every industry has its own trade publications - magazines, websites, newspapers, etc that cover their industry. Likewise, there are book industry trade publications that review books.
By submitting your book to these book industry reviewers, in advance of your book’s publication, your book could be getting the exposure of the vast reach of the book trade publications - a pretty huge reach to possible book buyers and sales. The trade publications go out to book buyers and those in the book industry. Buyers will learn about your book in advance if your book is selected for review. If picked, you are already building buzz for your book and perhaps even booking sales ahead of your publication date.
As well, you have an endorsement from a respected entity in the book world that you will add to your book page on sales outlets, on the front and back cover of your book and on the inside, in every media kit item you prepare, and your website and social media… Yay you!
Julie and I will be submitting Get Your Book Seen and Sold for book industry review five months in advance of publication. This week and next, Julie is preparing an eGalley and a print galley and I am researching each book industry reviewer to update myself on their new submission requirements and the materials they request for submission. I am also working on an “sell sheet” for the book and a press release for the book because many of the book industry reviewers require that information (and you want to give book reviewers everything they require).
Briefly, how does Book Industry Reviewer outreach work?
More information in Part Two of this topic coming next week and for subscribers only. But a quick summary is below.
The good news:
There are only a handful or so of book industry reviewers
The bad news is:
You must submit your book for consideration for review four to five months in advance (in the case of Library Journal, SIX months in advance) of your publication date
Each book industry reviewer has specific requirements as to the type of book and the type of publisher they will review and you will need to research each one. (I will do some of that work for you in the next post)
Each book industry reviewer has specific requirements as to how to submit your book to them. Some want an e-file of the book. Some want you to upload to a specific platform. Some want a print copy of your galley or ARC. (which means you have to create a galley or ARC - advanced review copy)
For those who say that outreach for possible review from a book industry reviewer is hard to get and not worth your time, I submit exhibit A below.
A snapshot of my first book’s Amazon pages below. It was reviewed by Bookpage and Foreword and I can assure you that book sales followed.
For the 7 or 8 book reviewers out there, why not give it a shot?
In the next post, for subscribers only, I will detail the book industry reviewers with some contact information for you to use as part of your book marketing plan.
As always, thanks for reading and leave any questions on the comments.
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When you are ready to make some decisions about YOUR book subscribe today and let’s come up with a plan.
Sarah - that is a great question. There is a belief that you should NEVER pay for a review.
There are, however, organizations that offer reasonable priced book promotion for your book by offering your book to be reviewed by their database of bloggers. The bloggers decide if they would like to read and review you your book. With WOW's (Women-on-Writing) promotion program, for example, you could get 15 reviews of your book with the promotion. Are you "paying" for the promotion...not exactly. WOW exposes your book to their arsenal of bloggers and bloggers decide to review your book and write a fair review... If "Women Writers" are in your target market, this is a sensible promotion to try. Your book will be featured in their newsletter that reaches 10's of thousands of email addresses in their network, be highlighted on WOW's newsletter and you could asl be asked for interviews which you can then post... you get the idea.
To outright pay for a review, to Kirkus, for example, seems to go against the idea of "fair review" as well, why pay for reviews when with a little elbow grease, you could get them for free?
On the subject of influencers... there are influencers who will mention your book or review your book on their social media - Instagram, Facebook, for example. Again, if their followers match your book's target market exactly and they have many followers, it might be worth the book promotion dollars to give it shot. I would ask the influencer for a happy client and see an example of what they have posted for other authors.
I would rather see promotion dollars go to writing a great press release and then paying to send that press release across all media for possible review, mention or interview. WebWire is an example of a company that will distribute your book's press release across thousands of media for a fee.
I'll be writing in the coming weeks about additional book review outreach steps that I will be taking to promote my book. The ideas won't cost much... some time and postage...perhaps outlay for media contact lists and to create an eGalley.
So I've gotten A LOT of inquiries from "influencers" asking if I will pay them to review my self-published book. I keep saying no. Is it ever worth it and how do we know what to trust?